Valri shook her head. “You lay it on any thicker and I’ll have to get a shovel to make my way to the door.” She sighed, giving him her full attention. “All right, Lukkas, what kind of a puzzle did you bring me this time?” she asked.
“I come bearing laptops,” he told her, indicating the two sealed envelopes he’d placed on her desk. “They belonged to two women who were recently murdered. In each case, the murderer made it look like it was a drug overdose.”
“But you think it wasn’t?”
“Questioning one victim’s mother and going by information from someone who knew the other woman—” for now, he was deliberately keeping DeMarco’s name out of it, although he did mean to get back to that “—they swear that both women had conquered their drug problems and were leading normal, productive lives.”
She made the logical leap. “You think the two cases are connected?” Valri asked him.
“I’m pretty sure, but that’s what I’m hoping you and your magical ways are going to find out and prove for me. And, just for the record, there aren’t two cases, there are seven.”
Valri eyed him. “Seven?”
He nodded. “Seven. All were dark-haired young women in their twenties, all were found dead from a drug overdose with a syringe either in their arm or lying near them. The scenes were all staged,” he said, telling his cousin what his gut had led him to believe.
“It could all just be a terrible coincidence,” Valri commented.
He gave her a patient, if somewhat patronizing, look. “And what was it that we all learned when we were growing up?”
She glanced at the container of chai tea on her desk. “Beware of good-looking men bearing gifts?”
“No,” he corrected. “There are no such things as coincidences.” Luke paused as he played back her words in his head. “You think I’m good-looking?” he asked, amused.
“In a motley sort of way,” Valri told him. “Now go,” she ordered. “Leave me to my work before I find a way to bury these laptops under a pile of paperwork,” Valri warned.
Luke was already out the door. “You’ll call if you find something?”
“I’ll call if I find something,” she told him. It was a given. “Now go!”
She found herself talking to empty space. Luke had left.
“I should have said that in the first place,” she murmured under her breath as she got back to work.
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